Salman Rushdie health update: Author may lose eye, is on ventilator; key points
Salman Rushdie was attacked and stabbed in the neck on Friday when he was about to give a lecture in western New York.
Author Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator following hours of surgery after being stabbed in the neck and torso at a lecture in New York on Friday.
He will likely lose one eye, his book agent Andrew Wylie said. "The news is not good," he wrote in an email.
"Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged."
The 75-year-old was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York`s Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist, who has lived with a bounty on his head since the late 1980s.
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Mumbai, before moving to the United Kingdom, has long faced death threats for his fourth novel - The Satanic Verses.
It was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication.